Wolves get a temporary reprieve
Posted January 21, 2009 in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
Yesterday, just after he became President, Barack Obama ordered all federal agencies to withdraw any regulations proposed by the Bush Administration that had not yet been officially published or gone into effect. President Obama's order is similar to one issued by President Bush when he entered the White House.
So far as wolves are concerned, this is a stay of execution. The Bush Administration's plan to strip wolves of Endangered Species Act protections has not yet been published. But it is only a temporary reprieve. The Obama Administration will be conducting a "legal and policy review" of all the frozen regulations. It thus falls to conservationists to convince the President that wolves still need protection. I'm confident that this is an argument we can win. The new Secretary of Interior, Ken Salazar, has already publicly committed that the Administration will rely on sound science when managing wildlife and, in this case, both the legal and the scientific evidence is clear: gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains are not yet recovered.
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Comments
Marion Dickinson — Jan 21 2009 03:43 PM
If the wolves stay on track to be delisted, it is only to allow fundraising by the various envionmental groups, both as a plea to the public to "save the wolf" and as a way to receive awards for expenses from Judge Malloy.
Are you old enough to remember when the cry was for a total of 300 wolves, most of them in the Tetons and Yellowstone NPs? An out and out lie wasn't it?
Andrew Wetzler — Jan 21 2009 04:27 PM
Marion:
We don't think the 300 number was ever justified. Check out our comments on the wolf delisting here:
http://wolves.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/nrdc-comments-wolf-delisting-nov28-2008.pdf
I think you'll see that our position on what's needed for recovery is well-grounded in science.
Randy Johnson — Jan 21 2009 08:47 PM
Does the NRDC support removing the Western Great Lakes population of wolf from the ESA? And if "No" what is your reasoning?
Andrew Wetzler — Jan 21 2009 09:03 PM
We don't work on the Midwest population directly and thus haven't expressed a specific view on the proposal to delist it.
More generally, though, we think there is a fundamental problem with discussing all of these populations, whether it be gray wolves in the Southwest, Midwest, or northern Rockies, in isolation from each other. Wolves are protected as a single species, yet the Fish and Wildlife Service has never systematically thought about or developed a vision for what recovery of the species would look like, just recovery of population pockets.